Mars is Hard

That's the message that NASA and others in the space community have hammered into the public for years. It is, they argue, difficult enough to send a spacecraft to Mars, and even harder to land one there, a message clearly communicated by the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video released by NASA before the (successful) landing of the rover Curiosity last summer. Try to do the same with people--a task requiring larger spacecraft with life support systems, among other challenges--and the difficultly multiplies exponentially.

That extreme level of difficulty, and corresponding implied extreme expense, has led to the conclusion that only a government, or a coalition of governments, can send humans to Mars. It's also been a long-term goal: President George W. Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration featured human missions to Mars at an unspecified date after a 2020 return to the Moon, while President Barack Obama in 2010 called for a human mission to orbit Mars in the mid-2030s and a landing to follow presumably shortly thereafter."

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The private road to Mars, The Space Review\n\n\"Mars is hard.\n\nThat's the message that NASA and others in the space community have hammered into the public for years. It is, they argue, difficult enough to send a spacecraft to Mars, and even harder to land one there, a message clearly communicated by the \"Seven Minutes of Terror\" video released by NASA before the (successful) landing of the rover Curiosity last summer. Try to do the same with people--a task requiring larger spacecraft with life support systems, among other challenges--and the difficultly multiplies exponentially.\n\nThat extreme level of difficulty, and corresponding implied extreme expense, has led to the conclusion that only a government, or a coalition of governments, can send humans to Mars. It's also been a long-term goal: President George W. Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration featured human missions to Mars at an unspecified date after a 2020 return to the Moon, while President Barack Obama in 2010 called for a human mission to orbit Mars in the mid-2030s and a landing to follow presumably shortly thereafter.\"

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